The Lucasville Uprising was a rebellion against oppressive and racist policies at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility (SOCF) in Lucasville, OH. Nine inmates and one guard died during the uprising in April of 1993. Today, many people are serving time or condemned to death by the state of Ohio in relation to the uprising. We demand amnesty for all of these inmates. The conditions at SOCF were (and still are) intolerable and unconscionable.

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Re-Examining Lucasville

RE-EXAMINING
LUCASVILLE

by
Staughton Lynd

Staughton
Lynd is the author of Lucasville:
the Untold Story of a Prison Uprising
and Layers
of Injustice.
He and his wife Alice have been steadfast organizers with the
Lucasville Uprising prisoners since 1996. The Lynds have been labor
lawyers and civil rights activists since the 1960s. Staughton made
this statement at the Re-Examining Lucasville Conference. Our
focus this morning has been a detailed discussion of what happened
before and during the eleven days and in the trials that followed.
My comments are intended to build a bridge between that analysis and
the broader perspectives that will be offered this afternoon. I will
divide my remarks in four parts. First, I shall recall the three
biggest prison rebellions in recent United States history. I will
suggest that while we are just beginning to build a movement outside
the walls of both prisons and courtrooms, there are particular
aspects of the Lucasville events that help to explain why that has
been so hard. Second, I will make the case that, despite
appearances, Ohio’s prison administration was at least as
responsible as were the prisoners for the ten deaths during the
occupation of L block. Third, I shall describe the manipulation
by means of which the State of Ohio induced a leader of the uprising
to become an informer and to attribute responsibility for the murder
of hostage Officer Robert Vallandingham to others. I shall add that
to this day the State says it does not know who the hands-on killers
were. Finally, and very briefly, because I recognize this will be
the agenda for tomorrow morning, I will ask: What is to be done?

Three
Prison Uprisings

There have been three major prison
uprisings in the United States during the past half century.

The first and best-known rebellion was at
Attica in western New York State in September 1971. Prisoners
occupied a recreation yard. After three days, agents of the state
assaulted the area, guns blazing. The prisoners had killed three
prisoners and a guard. The state’s assault resulted in the deaths
of 29 more prisoners and an additional 10 guards whom the prisoners
were holding as hostages.

Initially the State of New York,
including Governor Nelson Rockefeller, claimed that the hostage
officers who died in the yard had their throats cut by the prisoners
in rebellion. A courageous medical examiner said, No, the officers
all died of bullet wounds. And only one side in the conflict, or
massacre, had guns.

Because the brazen cover story of the
authorities was so soon and so dramatically refuted, the prosecution
of prisoners at Attica never got far off the ground. On December 31,
1976, a little more than five years after the events at the prison,
New York governor Carey declared by executive order an amnesty for
all participants in the insurrection. He stated in part:

Attica
has been a tragedy of immeasurable proportions, unalterably affecting
countless lives. Too many families have grieved, too many have
suffered deprivations, too many have lived their lives in uncertainty
waiting for the long nightmare to end. For over five years and with
hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless man-hours we have
followed the path of investigation and accusation. . . . To continue
in this course, I believe, would merely prolong the agony with no
better hope of a just and abiding conclusion.

The governor concluded by saying that his
actions should not be understood to imply “a lack of culpability
for the conduct at issue.” Rather, Governor Carey stated, “these
actions are in recognition that there does exist a larger wrong which
transcends the wrongful acts of individuals.”

In
1980 a second major uprising occurred at the state prison in Santa
Fe, New Mexico. Again there were numerous deaths, but all 33
homicides resulted from prisoners killing other prisoners. No
officers were murdered. No prisoner was

sentenced
to death.

Finally
we come to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville in
1993. In trying to understand the tangle of events we call
“Lucasville” one confronts: a prisoner body of more than 1800, a
majority of them black men from Ohio’s inner cities, guarded by
correctional officers largely recruited from the entirely, or almost
entirely, white community in Scioto County; a prison administration
determined to suppress dissent after the murder of an educator in
1990; an eleven-day occupation by more than four hundred men of a
major part of the Lucasville prison; ten homicides, all committed by
prisoners, including the murder of hostage officer Robert
Vallandingham; dialogue between the parties ending in a peaceful
surrender; and about fifty prosecutions, resulting in five capital
convictions and numerous other sentences, some of them likely to last
for the remainder of a prisoner’s life.

The
task for defense lawyers, and for a community campaign demanding
reconsideration, is more difficult than at Attica or Santa Fe. At
Attica, 10 of the 11 officers who died were killed by agents of the
State. At Santa Fe, only prisoners were killed. Lucasville presents
a distinct challenge: the killing of a single hostage correctional
officer murdered by prisoners in rebellion.

Who
Is To Blame?

In
a summary booklet Alice and I have produced, entitled Layers of
Injustice, we argue that the Lucasville prisoners in L block,
considered collectively, and the State of Ohio share
responsibility for the tragedy of April 1993. Both sides
contributed to what happened. Events spun out of control. Neither
side intended what occurred.

The collective responsibility of
prisoners in L-blockseems self-evident. Ten men were killed.
The victims were unarmed and helpless. In contrast to what happened
at Attica, all ten victims were killed by prisoners.

However, Muslim prisoner Reginald
Williams, a witness for the State in the Lucasville trials, testified
that the hope of the group that planned the 1993 occupation was to
carry out a brief, essentially peaceful, attention-getting action
“to get someone from the central office to come down and address
our concerns” (State v. Were I at 1645), “to barricade
ourselves in L-6 until we can get someone from Columbus to discuss”
alternative means of doing the TB tests (State v. Sanders at
2129.) Siddique Abdullah Hasan, supposed by the State to have
planned and led the action, said the same thing to the Associated
Press within the past two weeks.

Since the prisoners, whatever their
initial intentions, nonetheless carried out the homicides, the
responsibility of the State is less obvious. Here are some of the
main reasons I believe that the State of Ohio shares responsibility
for what happened at Lucasville in 1993.

1. In 1989, Warden Terry Morris
asked the legislative oversight committee of the Ohio General
Assembly to prepare a survey of conditions at the Southern Ohio
Correctional Facility in Lucasville. The Correctional Institution
Inspection Committee received letters from 427 prisoners and
interviewed more than 100. Such was the state of disarray in 1989
that, four years before the 1993 uprising, the CIIC reported that
prisoners “relayed fears and predictions of a major disturbance
unlike any ever seen in Ohio prison history.”

2. After the murder of educator
Beverly Jo Taylor in 1990, a new warden was appointed. Warden Arthur
Tate instituted what he called “Operation Shakedown.” A striking
example of the pervasive repression reported by prisoners is that
telephone communication between prisoners and the outside world was
limited to one, five minute, outgoing telephone call per year.

3.
The single feature of life at Lucasville that the CIIC found most
troublesome was the prison administration’s use of prisoner
informants, or “snitches.” Warden Tate, “King Arthur” as the
prisoners called him, expanded the use of snitches. In 1991 the
warden addressed a letter to all prisoners and visitors in which he
provided a special mailing address to which alleged violations of
“laws and rules of this institution” could be reported. Six
alleged snitches, a majority of the persons murdered during the
rebellion, were killed in the first hours of the disturbance.

4. The immediate cause or trigger of the
rebellion was Warden Tate’s insistence on testing for TB by
injecting a substance containing phenol, which a substantial number
of Muslim prisoners believed to be prohibited by their religion.
Alternative means of testing for TB by use of X rays or a sputum test
were available and had been used at Mansfield Correctional
Institution. In its post-surrender report, the correctional
officers’ labor union stated that Warden Tate was “unnecessarily
confrontational” in his response to the Muslim prisoners’ concern
about TB testing using phenol.

5 . Before Warden Tate departed
for the Easter weekend on Good Friday, three of his administrators
advised against his plan to lock the prison down and forcibly inject
prisoners who refused TB shots. The warden did not adequately alert
the reduced staff who would be on duty as to the volatile state of
affairs. Slow response to the initial occupation of L block let pass
an early opportunity to end the rebellion without loss of life. It
was two hours after the insurgency began before Warden Tate was
notified. The safewells at the end of each pod in L block, to which
correctional officers retreated as they had been instructed, turned
out to have been constructed without the prescribed steel stanchions
and were easily penetrated.

6. Sergeant Howard Hudson, who was in
the administration control booth during the eleven days and was
offered by prosecutors as a so-called “summary witness,” conceded
in his trial testimony that the State of Ohio deliberately stalled
when prisoners tried to end the standoff by negotiation. Hudson
testified in Hasan’s case: “The basic principle in these
situations . . . is to buy time. . . . [T]he more time that goes on
the greater the chances for a peaceful resolution to the situation.”
This assumption proved – to use an unfortunate phrase – to be
dead wrong.

7. By cutting off water and
electricity to the occupied cell block on April 12, the State created
a new cause of grievance. The prisoners’ concern to get back what
they had at the outset of the disturbance became the sticking point
in unsuccessful negotiations to end the standoff before Officer
Vallandingham was murdered.

8. On the morning of April14,
spokeswoman Tessa Unwin made a statement to the press on behalf of
the authorities. Ms. Unwin was asked to comment on a message written
on a sheet that was hung out of an L block window threatening to kill
a hostage officer. Rather than responding “No comment,” she
stated: “It’s a standard threat. It’s nothing new. . .
They’ve been threatening things like this from the beginning.”
According to several prisoners in L block and to hostage officer
Larry Dotson, this statement inflamed sentiment among the prisoners
who were listening on battery-powered radios. In the judgment of the
officers’ union, in their report on the disturbance:

As anyone familiar with the process and
language of negotiations would know, this kind of public discounting
of the inmate threats practically guaranteed a hostage death.

When an official DR&C spokesperson
publicly discounted the inmate threats as bluffing, the inmates were
almost forced to kill or maim a hostage to maintain or regain their
perceived bargaining strength.

9. In 2010, documentary filmmaker
Derrick Jones interviewed Daniel Hogan, who prosecuted Robb and
Skatzes and is now a state court judge. Hogan told Jones on tape:
“I don’t know that we will ever know who hands-on killed the
corrections officer, Vallandingham.” Later Mr. Jones asked former
prosecutor Hogan: “When it comes to Officer Vallandingham, who
killed him?” Judge Hogan replied: “I don’t know. And I don’t
think we’ll ever know.” Nonetheless, four spokespersons and
supposed leaders of the uprising have been found guilty of the
officer’s aggravated murder, and sentenced to death.

Who
Did Kill Officer Vallandingham?

With the help of Attorney Niki Schwartz,
three prisoner representatives accepted a 21 point agreement and a
peaceful surrender followed. The agreement stated in point 6,
“Administrative discipline and criminal proceedings will be fairly
and impartially administered without bias against individuals or
groups.” Point 14 added, “There will be no retaliatory actions
taken toward any inmate or groups of inmates.”

The
raw intent of the State to violate these understandings was made
clear during and immediately after the surrender. Inmate Emanuel
Newell, who had almost been killed by the rebelling prisoners, was
carried out of L block on a stretcher. A trooper asked him, What
did you see Skatzes do? Newell and John Fryman, who had been
assaulted by the insurgents and left for dead, were put in the
Lucasville infirmary. Both were approached by representatives of the
State. Fryman remembered:

They made it clear they wanted the
leaders. They wanted to prosecute Hasan, George Skatzes, Lavelle,
Jason Robb, and another Muslim. They had not yet begun their
investigation but they knew they wanted those leaders. I joked with
them and said, “You basically don’t care what I say as long as
it’s against these guys.” They said, “Yeah, that’s it.”

Newell
named the men who had interrogated him: Lieutenant Root, Sergeant
Hudson, and Troopers McGough and Sayers. According to Newell:

These officers said, “We want Skatzes.
We want Lavelle. We want Hasan.” They also said, “We know they
were leaders. . . . We want to burn their ass. We want to put them
in the electric chair for murdering Officer Vallandingham.”

With
the same motivation, the prosecutors pursued a more sophisticated
strategy. ODRC Director Reginald Wilkinson put it this way in an
article that he co-authored with his associate Thomas Stickrath for
the Corrections Management Quarterly:

According to Special Prosecutor Mark
Piepmeier, his staff targeted a few gang leaders. . . . Thirteen
months into the investigation, a primary riot provocateur agreed to
talk about Officer Vallandingham’s death. . . . His testimony led
to death sentences for riot leaders Carlos Sanders, Jason Robb, James
Were, and George Skatzes.

The
so-called primary riot provocateur was prisoner Anthony Lavelle,
leader of the Black Gangster Disciples, who, along with Hasan and
Robb, had negotiated the surrender agreement.

How
did the State induce Lavelle not only to talk, but to say what the
prosecution desired?

During the winter of 1993-1994, Hasan,
Lavelle, and Skatzes were housed in adjacent cells at the Chillicothe
Correctional Institution. On April 6, 1994, Skatzes was taken to a
room where he found Sergeant Hudson, Trooper McGough of the Highway
Patrol, and two prosecutors. This was the third such occasion and,
as twice before, Skatzes said that he did not wish to continue the
interview, and turned to go back to his cell in the North Hole.

What happened next, according to Skatzes,
was that Warden Ralph Coyle entered the room and said that Central
Office did not want Skatzes to go back to the North Hole. Skatzes
protested vehemently that this would make him look like a snitch.
Coyle was adamant and Skatzes was led away to a new location.

Back in the North Hole, Lavelle
reacted exactly as Skatzes feared. Lavelle wrote a letter to Jason
Robb that became an exhibit in Robb’s trial: “Jason: I am
forced to write you and relate a few things that happen down here
lately. With much sadness I will give you the raw deal, your brother
George has done a vanishing act on us. . . . On Wednesday, April 6,
1994 G. said about 8:00 a.m. that he had a lawyer visit . . . . Now
to be short and simple, he failed to return that day. Today they
came and packed up his property which leads me to one conclusion that
he has chose to be a cop.”

Later, Lavelle himself testified that he
turned State’s evidence because he thought he would go to Death Row
if he did not. This was an accurate assessment. Prosecutor Hogan
told a trial court judge at sidebar that his colleague Prosecutor
Stead had told Lavelle, Either you are going to be my witness or I’m
going to try to kill you. According to the testimony under oath of
prisoner Anthony Odom, who celled across from Lavelle at the time
Lavelle entered into his plea agreement, Lavelle “said he was gonna
cop out [be]cause the prosecutor was sweating him, trying to hit him
with a murder charge . . . . He said he was going to tell them what
they wanted to hear.”

Lavelle was understandably concerned that
the prosecutor might hit him with a murder charge because it is
overwhelmingly likely that it was, in fact, he who coordinated
Officer Vallandingham’s murder. I have laid out the evidence in my
book and in an article in the Capital University Law Review.
Briefly,

Three members of the Black Gangster
Disciples stated under oath that Lavelle tried to recruit them for a
death squad after Ms. Unwin’s statement on April 14;

Sean Davis, who slept in L-1 as Lavelle
did, testified that when he awoke on the morning of April 15, he
heard Lavelle telling Stacey Gordon that he was going to kill a guard
to which Gordon replied that he would clean up afterward;

The late James Bell a.k.a. Nuruddin
executed an affidavit before his death to the effect that Lavelle had
left the morning meeting on April 15 furious that the Muslims and
Aryans were unwilling to kill a hostage officer;

Three prisoners saw Lavelle and two other
Disciples come down the L- block corridor from L-1 and go into L-6,
leaving a few minutes later;

James Were, on guard duty in L-6 and
thereby an eye witness to the murder, went to L-1 when he learned
that the action had not been approved by other riot leaders and
knocked Lavelle to the ground. Willie Johnson and Eddie Moss heard
Were explicitly blame Lavelle for the killing;

Two older and, in my opinion, reliable
convicts, Leroy Elmore and the late Roy Donald, say that on April 15
Lavelle told each of them in so many words that he had had the guard
killed.

Unlike
prisoners who testified for the State, the twelve men whose evidence
I have summarized received no benefits for coming forward and, in
fact, risked retaliation from other inmates by doing so. No jury has
ever heard their collective narrative.

What
is to be Done?

So, what can we do?

The first task is to make it possible for
the men condemned to death and life in prison to tell their stories,
on camera, in face-to-face interviews with representatives of the
media.

For twenty years the State of Ohio,
through both its Columbus office of communications and individual
wardens, has denied requests for media access to all prisoners
convicted of illegal acts during the 11-day occupation. Indeed, in
the 11-day occupation itself, one of the prisoners’ persistent
demands was for the opportunity to tell their story to the world. In
telephone calls to the authorities during the first night of the
occupation, prisoner representatives proposed a telephone interview
with one media representative, or a live interview with a designated
TV channel, in exchange for the release of one hostage correctional
officer. At 7:00 a.m. on Monday, April 12 the prisoners in rebellion
broke off telephone negotiations, demanding local and national news
coverage before any hostage release.

In the late morning of April 12, George
Skatzes volunteered to go out on the yard, accompanied by Cecil
Allen, carrying an enormous white flag of truce. The men asked for
access to the media already camped outside the prison walls.

When on April 15 and 16 the prisoners
released hostage officers Darrold Clark and Anthony Demons, what did
they ask for and get in return? The opportunity for one
spokesperson, Skatzes, to make a radio address and for another,
Muslim Stanley Cummings, to speak on TV the next morning.

Now the Lucasville prisoners are again
knocking on the door of the State, hunger striking, crying out
against their isolation from the dialogue of civic society. They
ask, Why are we being kept incommunicado? What is the State afraid
of?

I urge all present not to be distracted
by official talk about alternative means of communication. The state
tells us that the men condemned to death can write letters and make
telephone calls. But the media access that these prisoners seek is
the kind of exchange that can occur in courtroom cross-examination.
The condemned are saying to us, Before you kill me, give me a chance
to join with you in trying to figure out what actually occurred.

These are not homicides like that of
which Mumia Abu Jamal is accused or that for which Troy Davis was
executed: homicides with one decedent, one alleged perpetrator, and
half a dozen witnesses. This is an immense tangle of events. There
is no objective evidence except for the testimony of the medical
examiners, which repeatedly contradicted the claims of the
prosecution. Very few physical objects remain in existence. The
medical examiner testified that David Sommers was killed by a single
massive blow with an object like a bat. A bloody baseball bat was
found near the body of David Sommers. Special Prosecutor Mark
Piepmeier ordered the bat to be destroyed.

We need media access to the Lucasville
Five and their companions not just to perceive them as human beings,
but to determine the truth. George Skatzes and Aaron Jefferson were
tried in separate trials and each was convicted of striking the
single massive blow that killed Mr. Sommers. Eric Girdy has
confessed to being one of the three killers of Earl Elder, using a
shank made of glass from the mirror in the officers’ restroom, and
slivers of glass were found in one of the lethal wounds and on the
nearby floor. Girdy has insisted under oath that Skatzes had nothing
to do with the murder; yet the State, while accepting Girdy’s
confession, has not vacated the judgment against Skatzes. Hasan and
Namir were found Not Guilty of killing Bruce Harris yet Stacey
Gordon, who admitted to being one of the killers, is on the street.
The trial court judge in Keith LaMar’s trial refused to direct the
prosecution to turn over to counsel for the defense the transcripts
of all interviews conducted by the Highway Patrol with potential
witnesses of the homicides for which LaMar was convicted, and LaMar
is now closest to death of the Five. Jason Robb did nothing to cause
the death of Officer Vallandingham except to attend an inconclusive
meeting also attended by Anthony Lavelle, but only Robb was sentenced
to death.

These things are not right, not just, not
fair. The men facing death and life imprisonment for their alleged
actions in April 1993 need to be full participants in the
truth-seeking process. That is why, to repeat, I believe that our
first task following this gathering is to make it possible for these
men to tell their stories, on camera, in face-to-face interviews with
representatives of the media. Journalists, for example from campus
newspapers, who wish precise information as to how to request
interviews should contact me.